Do you have a single chocking point? For example, the application relies on 1 giant legacy database or some host systems?

So what if your web applications can scale during busy periods. You still choke at your database. And scaling may actually reduce performance with too many connections to the database.

You do not have to be able to say yes to everything. However, it changes the nature of your design.

Team Considerations

Developers can not suddenly become DevOps.

You need OpsDev viewpoint as much as DevOps.

Management and budget are different.

Cloud Platform expertise is a must (either bake in project to build or though tough to get because still young hire). Better, do both. Expertise at this point (Jan 2017) is still limited and if you are not similar to Google, LinkedIn, Netflix expert probably does not know traditional IT required for your company.

To write up here... what kind of talent attributes we need and key challenges we've seen.

How to grow full stack DevOps and OpsDev staff.

Cloud Smoke Test

Have the cloud "smoke test" up front before the project starts. These are also great questions to ask to understand and validate the success of moving to Cloud,

Question

Cloud Advantage

Value Commentary

Demonstrate environment can be torn down and built up within minutes from recipe.

See the environment be torn down and built up in different environments, IST, UAT and Production?

Show the environment scales up and down?

Path to Cloud

Here is high level path and approach to Cloud taking the Bonsai Framework approach.